My Roleplay System

Chapter 240: Chapter 240: Mystic Order

Swoosh. Swoosh.

The rapid sound of a sword cutting through air filled the training room.

Gwen moved through her final set with the smooth precision of someone who had performed this exact sequence tens of thousand of times. Footwork, weight transfer, extension, recovery. Her body knew the routine well enough that her mind was free to wander—which, lately, had become the problem.

"Hah... Hah..."

She finished the set and stood still for a moment, chest rising and falling as she regulated her breathing. Then she checked her wristband. A recommended mission notification sat in the group chat, sent by Lake not too long ago. She stared at it for a moment longer than necessary before sending a thumbs up and closing the interface.

The training room felt too quiet after that.

"Haah... what is wrong with me."

She pressed her palm against her forehead, then dragged it slowly down her face.

It had been weeks since the rift incident, and she still hadn’t managed to put it properly to rest in her mind. That was the part she found most irritating—not the incident itself, but her own inability to file it away and move on the way she normally could. She was a Silverveil. Unsolved problems were her specialty and fixation. She found them, approached them systematically, and resolved them one layer at a time until it is filed away.

Yet Lake simply refused to be filed.

She had tried. She’d gone back over every interaction, every observation, every detail she’d collected since the first time she’d noticed him during the second-year hunting expedition.

Magic in a world that didn’t have magic. Assassination instincts that had no reasonable origin. Growth that outpaced anything talent alone could explain.

She had more data than when she started yet she understood less than before she began.

And tomorrow she had agreed to go hunting with him.

’That’s it. Tomorrow I find something. Anything.’

She told herself this with the same conviction she’d used three times already this week. It hadn’t helped those times either, but the alternative—accepting that Lake might simply be a problem without a solution—wasn’t something she was prepared to admit.

Biting her lip, Gwen tightened her grip on her sword and began another set. The rhythm of the blade was the only thing reliable enough to push the feeling back, at least temporarily. She let herself sink into it completely.

For now, that would have to be enough.

****

In an open plain about 30km east of the nearest city, Lake finished off the last fleeing kobold in the pack they were tasked to eliminate.

"Not bad..."

Lake muttered as he glanced over the bloodied battlefield. Just from a quick glance, he could see more than a hundred kobold corpses strewn across the grass and trees. From this less-than-an-hour battle, he had managed to earn over 1,000 RP points.

"Phew, finally managed to kill them all."

"Damn these rats. Why were there so many?"

"Heh, just be grateful they were mostly Rank One. If I had to deal with another horde of Rank Two, I might really start to believe that our junior is cursed."

Hana, Jayce, and Landur chatted while cleaning the blood off themselves.

"Hm? Gwen, you okay?" Hana called out, noticing Gwen standing blankly to the side.

"...Yeah. I’m fine. I just didn’t expect it to end so fast."

"Hmm? Isn’t that a good thing?"

"Yeah, yeah it is..."

"..?"

Gwen sighed as she glanced at Lake for a moment before calling out to everyone.

"Since we’ve finished clearing out the pack, let’s hurry up and head back."

"Already ahead of you."

Landur grinned from the side, already starting to walk back toward the city.

"Hey, wait up!"

Hana ran up to stand beside him as everyone else also began to make a move.

"Could everyone wait a moment?"

Lake’s voice stopped everyone in their tracks.

"Actually, there was something else I wanted to do while I’m out here."

Listening to him, everyone’s curiosity was piqued, especially Gwen, whose ears perked up.

"It’s not far from here, but it might take a while for me to finish. So I don’t want you guys to wait on me for long."

"Hm? What do you mean, Junior? We’re definitely coming with you."

Jayce’s reply drew a short chuckle from Lake as he said, "Figured. Then let’s hurry up and go."

"Mhm! How exciting! To think I’ll be following the Demon King around now! What a long way I’ve fallen from being a heroine..."

Hana joked as everyone followed Lake another 30km deeper into the wilderness. After a while, the group came to a stop, eyeing their surroundings curiously when they saw that Lake came to a stop by an old oak tree.

"We’re here."

"What do you want to do here, Junior?"

Instead of replying, Lake closed his eyes and sensed the surrounding mana. Soon, he found a disruption in the natural order as he began to cast a spell.

The ground beneath the oak tree began to part, the dirt digging itself up and revealing a hidden chasm beneath as a gust of violent wind rushed out of the opening.

"Wow... is that..."

"Junior, when you said you had something to do, you didn’t mean what I think you did, right?"

Everyone stared in amazement at the swirling portal of mana before them.

"No matter how I look at it, that’s a rift, isn’t it?"

Landur made an expression halfway between crying and laughing.

Lake smiled at everyone’s diverse reactions.

"Lake," Gwen called out, a deeply serious look on her face. "You weren’t planning on raiding it alone, were you?"

Lake’s smile deepened as he said, "Of course not."

Gwen, along with the others, breathed a sigh of relief, finally able to see some logic from their insane junior. However, it seemed they had been relieved too soon.

"I was just going to enter ahead of the extraction team and clear out any obstacles."

Lake spoke as everyone stared at him as if they had swallowed a fly.

Hana and Landur looked ready to start complaining, but Gwen caught a key detail in his words that she couldn’t let slip.

"Wait, you said extraction team. This is a discovered rift?"

"Yep. My guild even has a licensed registration to raid it."

"Guild? Junior, you joined a guild? Since when?"

Landur and the others seemed surprised by Lake’s reveal.

"No, I didn’t join one." Lake’s smile deepened, drawing confused looks from everyone before his next words hit them like a hammer.

"I created one."

"..!"

Shocked expressions covered everyone’s faces. Even Gwen was not spared from this wave of revelations.

"Junior, that isn’t a funny joke if it is one."

"It isn’t a joke. I really did create one."

Lake sighed as he opened his wristband interface and showed them the guild icon.

It was the image of a blooming rose against a black background. Above it, in bold letters, was the name Mystic Order.

It was the name he decided on after much deliberation about what to name his future faction.

Gwen stared in a daze at the official association stamp in the corner of the image, recognizing the guild as an official organization underneath the Martial Arts Association.

"You really went and created a guild..."

Gwen muttered in disbelief as the others stared at the logo in a daze.

"S-Still, isn’t it a bit soon to be raiding rifts again? It hasn’t even been that long since the last incident..."

Hana pointed out, recalling the events of their last experience with rifts.

Lake paused for a bit before answering, "No, I don’t think so. On the contrary, I think we’re far behind schedule."

"Huh? What do you mean?"

Jayce and the others looked somewhat confused as Lake continued.

"It’s been a few weeks since that event, and in that time, we have not made any meaningful progress. In the meantime, Prestige is still out there, plotting who knows what."

"If we wait any longer, we might not be prepared enough to fight or even survive the next time."

Hearing Lake’s words, Gwen and the others felt there was some sense in them but still couldn’t see why he had to raid a rift to do it.

"Still, that doesn’t explain why we have to raid a rift. Couldn’t you just improve or focus on training instead? A rift’s only real value is resource extraction, and even then, it’s a gamble whether you can get anything. It has nothing to do with improving our current strength. At most, it can accumulate experience."

Gwen reasoned and pointed out the flaws in his operation, to which Lake only responded with a shrug.

"That may be true, but you never know till you try? Didn’t most of the mana circulation arts and martial techniques we use today come from modified versions of the ones found in rifts? Who’s to say we won’t be lucky and find something that can rapidly improve our strength inside? Besides, it would net us more profit and experience than just hunting wild monsters like we were doing before."

Lake’s words made Gwen contemplate for a moment, a frown on her face. Eventually, she sighed before looking at the rest.

"What about the rest of you?"

"Us?" Hana pointed to herself as she quickly replied, "We’ll follow your lead, sis."

Hearing Hana’s answer, Gwen glanced at Landur and Jayce, who also nodded in agreement. With another sigh, Gwen shrugged her shoulders as she said, "Very well. Since everyone doesn’t seem opposed to the idea, I guess we’ll follow your lead, Lake."

Gwen glanced up at Lake, who smiled before sending a request to everyone’s wristband.

"Great! I sent you the official application form. Just fill it out and you’ll be registered as temporary hunters affiliated with Mystic Order, allowing you to legally follow me inside."

Seeing the detailed form sent to them, Gwen couldn’t help but raise an eyebrow as she glanced back at Lake. "You sure thought this through, didn’t you?"

Lake only smiled back in response as everyone quickly filled out the form.

After confirming everything was in order, he led the group down into the chasm from which mana was pouring out.

With a wide grin, Lake glanced back at everyone as he said, "Well then, without further ado, shall we get this raid started?"